Krzysztof Grzybacz painted flowers as though they were people for years, and now paints people the same way, using a method where every mark is made by removal

Most painters fix a bad decision by covering it. Krzysztof Grzybacz cannot. He puts the oil down and then washes it off, and what is left after the removing is the painting. His gallery describes the colour in his work as a residue, which is not a flourish. It is a literal account of where it came from.

Haruspicy, the largest thing he has ever made on one surface, is over four metres wide. Think about that for a second in a method with no undo.

The flowers were always people

In Warsaw last spring he showed Floral Compositions: big oil paintings of flowers, and they are worth going back for. The blooms sit in comfortable togetherness, each one looking more like itself because of the different thing next to it. The show's own line is the giveaway: "Flowers are like people, they pose, search for their own space, and mark out boundaries." Painted with the queer community in view, they read as an argument for alliance made entirely out of petals.

Haruspex, at Pace this month, is eight paintings of bodies. The body as a layered structure that keeps traces of every earlier version of itself. One figure wears a white top with a zip that could just as easily be a rib cage.

This is the same painter doing the same thing, not a florist who found a serious subject. He has been painting people all along; the move to torsos just takes the metaphor out.

Painting by subtraction

Here is what makes the method hard, and it is not the patience. In additive painting, a wrong colour is a problem you can bury under the right one. Working the way he does, every correction is another removal, and the surface holds the evidence of every pass you made at it. Four metres of that, with nowhere to hide and nothing to paint over, is a nerve most painters never have to find out whether they have.

The palette has a reason behind it too, and it is a strange and specific one. He follows the theory that colour appeared in plants first and, by appearing, taught animals and eventually people how to see colour at all. Which means the flower paintings and the flesh paintings are not two phases. They are one idea about where colour comes from, tested twice.

The title is Roman. A haruspex read the liver and the gallbladder of a sacrificed animal to find out what the gods wanted. He only met the word recently and kept it because peeling back a layered thing to see what is inside is exactly the job. One critic at the opening: "Pace is quite the stage for a debut, but judging by these paintings, he's more than ready for it."

It runs until 3 October. After that the next one will be somewhere further away.

Rather than adding more paint, I just remove it.

Krzysztof Grzybacz, on how the paintings are actually made